Tuesday, 22 March 2016

The title sounds like I did something awful but don't worry, I haven't severely disabled any more Norns yet. Today was observation only.

There's this great website out there, don't know if I've linked to it before, but it's called The Creatures Developer Resource. It's no longer being updated, but it has some really good information about the Norn brain and some astoundingly useful tools for analysing Norn brains. Norn brains are something I'd love to come to understand, but due to their complexity it's not good to jump right in and start making random changes that I think might work (which seems to be my approach to other areas of Norn genetics, hehe...), especially because, even with Chris's awesome tools from CDR, it's hard to understand exactly what the changes you've made have done if you don't understand anything about Norn brains.

So I thought that, in order to properly accustom myself to using Chris's tools and to wrap my head around something Norn brain-y—the Norn learning process, which I know about but have never seen in action on a neuronal level—I thought I would do a little bit of an observational experiment: I would create a new baby norn in a new world, and using the monitoring tools from CDR, see if I could track some of the things it was learning. I downloaded the Brain Viewer, Lobe Study, Brain Cell Monitor and Brain Activity from here to assist me with this experiment.